AP Exclusive: Memos show US hushed up Soviet crime

Via WRSA

FILE - In this May 1943 file photo, a group of American and British POWs being held by the Germans, including Lt. Col. John H. Van Vliet Jr. and Capt. Donald B. Stewart, look over a mass grave where murdered Polish officers are buried, near Smolensk, Russia. The Soviet secret police killed the Poles in 1940, hoping to eliminate an elite that would have resisted Soviet control of Poland. Van Vliet and Stewart were among a group of British and American prisoners forced to see the horrifying site by the Germans, who wanted word to get out to the world of the Soviet atrocity. Newly declassified documents being opened to the public on Monday, Sept. 10, 2012, by the U.S. National Archives show that Van Vliet and Stewart sent coded messages to Washington after their visit saying they believed the German account of Soviet guilt. It is credible evidence that Washington had relatively early on, but of which it still chose to ignore in order not to jeopardize the alliance with Joseph Stalin. (AP Photo/File)

The American POWs sent secret coded messages to Washington with news of a Soviet atrocity: In 1943 they saw rows of corpses in an advanced state of decay in the Katyn forest, on the western edge of Russia, proof that the killers could not have been the Nazis who had only recently occupied the area.

The testimony about the infamous massacre of Polish officers might have lessened the tragic fate that befell Poland under the Soviets, some scholars believe. Instead, it mysteriously vanished into the heart of American power. The long-held suspicion is that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt didn't want to anger Josef Stalin, an ally whom the Americans were counting on to defeat Germany and Japan during World War II.

Documents released Monday and seen in advance by The Associated Press lend weight to the belief that suppression within the highest levels of the U.S. government helped cover up Soviet guilt in the killing of some 22,000 Polish officers and other prisoners in the Katyn forest and other locations in 1940.

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